Night Theatre

by Vikram Paralkar

  ‘Tell me, Saheb, what river have you chosen in life?’

  ‘I just … I try my best to help. Help those who come to me.’

  ‘And what do you expect out of it? For yourself ?’

  ‘Nothing much any more. Only that I be allowed to live my life. That the people who work for me not be harmed.’

  ‘That’s it? A balance of lives? That’s how you think about it?’

  ‘I try not to, but there are times.’

  ‘And tell me, if you find yourself in a position where you have to harm someone to preserve your own life, what would you do?’

  ‘Choose the just path. I hope I would have the courage.’

  ‘And what would the just path be?’

  ‘It would depend on the circumstance.’

  ‘A different river each time?’

  ‘If you insist on that word, then yes.’

  ‘And how would you choose between them?’

  ‘As you said just a minute ago, you just pick one and decide that its water is holy.’

  The surgeon said this in as a grim a tone as possible, but somehow it still amused the official enough to make him slap his hand on his thigh. ‘Very clever, Doctor Saheb. My own words turned back against me. Very clever.’

  The suffocating coils of sleep, even at a time like this, draped around the surgeon’s muscles, folded over his brain. Whatever was to happen, no matter how terrible, he hoped it would happen soon. But the official showed no sign that he wanted to stop speaking.

  ‘Tell me, Saheb, do you believe in God?’

  ‘Me? No. I’ve … I’ve never been God-fearing.’

  ‘God-fearing … Hmm. People use the term all the time, but it’s a strange one if you stop to think about it. Especially since God is supposed to be everywhere – in the earth, in the sky. But people don’t spend their lives fearing the earth and sky.’

  ‘Maybe they should.’

  ‘But you see, when the earth or sky kills you, it does so indiscriminately, without making any plans. God, on the other hand, He has a mind, He thinks. That’s what makes Him worthy of fear. Because no one knows what He’s planning. So you play games with Him, try to understand His mind.’

  ‘Play a game with God? How do you do that?’

  ‘Well, you can’t. If you set up a chessboard on the street and challenge God, He won’t come down to move His pieces. But a passer-by might. That’s how the game begins. And the passer-by is already playing other games. He’s quarrelling with his brother over their father’s will, extracting a loan from a bank, looking to fondle some woman’s breasts without having to hang a mangalsutra between them. Each game is small, but they’re all pieces of larger games, and the largest one, the one that contains them all, that’s the game you play with God.’

  His life and the lives of everyone else in the clinic, were in the hands of this unhinged official. And it wasn’t just drowsiness he was feeling. It was a slippage into non-existence – the world and everything in it scattering to pieces that no one, not even God, could ever put back together. The official kept talking about the stupidity of the pious: ‘holy threads around their bodies, eating certain foods on certain days, smearing ash on their foreheads’, about how God despised worship: ‘The villagers who fawn over you, Doctor Saheb, do you feel anything for them but contempt?’, about the mind of God: ‘He places puzzles in the world so that He can understand it better’. The surgeon had been under anaesthesia only once in his life, when his gall bladder was removed. What he was feeling now was no different from how he’d felt in the moments after propofol was injected into his vein. He selected a red spot on a scrap of paper on the desk, tried to keep its redness burning into his retina. The world couldn’t dissolve, he declared, as long as he kept this redness from leaching out. A single mind, if it wanted, could hold all of existence to ransom with a single red spot.

  ‘…All you can do is play His games. That’s why God keeps the universe going: to see what new moves he can learn from His creatures.’ The official adjusted himself in his chair. A smile spread under his moustache. ‘And death, that’s the most ingenious of all His games. You’ve made your share of moves in that one, haven’t you, Saheb?’

  A bead of sweat cut a slow path down the side of the surgeon’s face. When he saw the official’s eyes follow it from brow to cheek, he wiped it away with a quick brush of his palm. On the official’s face itself, there wasn’t a trace of moisture. And his skin was smooth, incredibly smooth.

  ‘You haven’t had your tea. Please. It must be growing cold.’

  ‘I will, I will,’ said the official, without making any effort to reach for the cup. His moustache, his hair, were a deep, unnatural black.

  ‘And what is this? Is this a game as well?’

  ‘This, Saheb? You mean my visit?’

  ‘Yes. Why are you here?’

  ‘I have as much of a right to be here as you. Tell me, why did you decide to become a surgeon?’

  ‘I … I don’t even know any more.’

  ‘Still, why?’

  ‘It seemed, during my training, that holding a diseased organ in my hand and cutting it out, it was a straightforward way of doing things.’

  ‘That makes sense, yes. And tell me, what gives you greater satisfaction, cutting people open or stitching them back?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Of all the creatures on earth, only humans can put things back together. But the ability to tear flesh apart – God gave it to every beast roaming in the jungle. So there must be something to it, some animal pleasure. Like eating and drinking. Or sex. It must fulfil some basic need.’

  ‘What a horrible—’

  ‘I’m just asking. You have skills that I don’t. So I can only learn these things through you. I like to ask questions, understand new things. Tell me, when you cut someone open, do you feel a thrill?’

  ‘Stop, that’s just, you can’t—’

  ‘To lower your hands into someone’s body and know that you hold their lives in the snip of a scissor, it must give you such a sense of power.’

  ‘No, no—’

  ‘What do you feel during a surgery, then? Answer me.’

  ‘Fear, it’s fear. Above everything else.’

  ‘Ah. Fear of what?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You can’t just have fear. It has to be fear of something.’

  ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘Your surgical skills, are you satisfied with what they’ve brought you?’

  The surgeon’s lips, his tongue, scratched against each other now, rough as sandpaper. The official leaned forward.

  ‘Whatever you’re feeling, Saheb, it’s quite understandable. It can’t be an easy thing, accepting that someone you treated like a rat yesterday has more power over you today than you could have imagined.’

  The official now picked up the cup. The tea was clearly cold by now, but he still blew on its surface before taking a sip. ‘You see, after our little meeting yesterday, I went straight to the head office to take a look at your file. You were such an unusual character, I had to learn your story, find out how someone like you ended up here. There are rooms upon rooms there, you can imagine, cabinets to the ceiling. It took me all evening, but I found it just as I was ready to give up.’

  The surgeon’s nerves, the strands of his hair, all stabbed like copper barbs. His eyes felt intensely clear.

  ‘You know a lot about compromise, don’t you, Saheb? People like you, you stand over others and lecture them about integrity, and then when it’s time to save your own skin, you soil your hands in the same dung. Your file is quite thick, I’m sure you know. Newspaper clippings, court records, all those things.

  ‘At one level, I don’t blame you. Look, mistakes happen. If I were in your place, I would have tried to bribe that other surgeon as well. When a patient is dead, he’s dead, it’s bad enough. Why rake up trouble for the doctor on top of that? But you never know what the person on the other side will be lik
e. Unlucky for you that your opponent ended up being a disciple of Gandhi.’

  The surgeon studied the flowers flattened under the glass, their dry, brown, dead petals.

  ‘All these supplies in the corridor, Saheb, they weren’t here yesterday when I checked. You’d hidden them somewhere. Just like you’re hiding that dealer in the back room right now. Look, I’m an understanding man. I know they don’t pay you enough. Selling supplies under the table, everyone does it – you’re not the only one, I’m not judging you. But they don’t pay me enough either. Not enough for me to keep my mouth shut when I see something like this.’

  A slow, heavy drip gathered in the surgeon’s gullet, swelled painfully behind his breastbone. The official finished his tea, wiped off a few drops hanging from his moustache, and sat straight in his chair. His fleshy face beamed.

  ‘It’s all up to you. If you think I’m just bluffing, then fine, I’ll make some calls, and my colleagues and I, we’ll make a detailed search and inventory of the clinic, go through all past records, interview the villagers about suspicious activity, all the routine stuff. I’m a decent man. I can keep my mouth shut. But I can’t promise you that the other officials won’t let something slip to the villagers about your past.’

  The surgeon reached into his back pocket. ‘Here.’

  The official looked at the two notes the surgeon had held out. ‘I have a wife and children, Saheb. My daughters are yet to be married. Whatever we think of this world, we still have to live in it.’

  The surgeon blinked at the money, then stuffed the notes back into his wallet. As he rose from his chair, a sharp pain pulled at his spine, and he stayed that way for a few seconds, stuck in that awkward pose. Then he limped to the safe and turned the lock. There was just one bundle in it, and a few scattered notes. He pulled out the bundle.

  There was no way for the surgeon to know if he’d overshot the usual amount for this sort of bribe. The official probably had enough practice with such dealings that he could keep his eyelids steady in a sandstorm. He took the bundle and started counting through it with the elegance of a bank teller.

  ‘Promise me I won’t see your face again,’ said the surgeon.

  A softness entered the official’s manner, ripened with his progress through the bundle. ‘I wish I could promise you that, Saheb, but I’ve been assigned to this clinic. Unless they replace me, it’s my job to check in once in a while. From your point of view, it’s good it’s me and not someone else, because who knows what my replacement might be like? But let me promise you this: you won’t see me for many months, let’s say six. I won’t stop by, I won’t let any other official bother you, and what’s more, I’ll make sure all of your supplies are delivered without a hitch. Then you can do whatever you want with them, and put down in your account books whatever you like. I’ll just rubber-stamp them.’

  Now done with his counting, the official folded the notes into a pocket in the lining of his trouser waist. He joined his palms to each other and made an exaggerated bow. And then he left. Feeling his eyelashes dampen, the surgeon turned to the wall.

  ‘I almost forgot, Saheb.’

  The official was in the doorway again, pointing at the polio vaccine ledger that lay shut at the edge of the desk. The same ledger whose columns the surgeon had been filling with numbers and calculations before the dead first appeared. That was why the official had returned to the clinic this morning: to collect the ledger and file it away in the head office. The man stood there as though expecting the book to be handed to him, but after a few moments passed in silence, he stepped in, picked it up without bothering to check its pages, and stepped over the blister-packed syringes in the corridor on his way out.

  Sixteen

  THE HAZE OF MORNING seemed to give even the peeling paint a surreal air, making it appear as though the clinic were casting off its old skin in an attempt at rebirth. A particularly large flake hung from the ceiling of the consultation room like an icicle. The surgeon let his eyes rest on it between glances at the window. Watching the official’s diminishing form was like staring into the sun – he could only endure a few moments of it before he had to turn his eyes away. There was a final insult in the man’s indifferent gait, in the way he strode without looking back, without a shred of further curiosity about the clinic or its contents. At the base of the hillock, the road curved, and the official disappeared behind a crumbling wall.

  ‘He’s gone,’ the surgeon called out. A weariness of death and of everything on either side of it filled him.

  The operating room was the first to open, and the pharmacist appeared at his door. ‘What did he want, Saheb?’

  ‘Nothing. Some paperwork.’

  The way the pharmacist was staring at him, the expression on her face, it made the surgeon wonder if he too had joined the ranks of the dead. Under the table, he placed the fingers of one hand on the wrist of the other. He still had a pulse.

  Then the door to the back room opened. The teacher approached with a shuffling walk. He seemed to be in great pain, though not from his wounds. Nothing had changed there.

  ‘Doctor Saheb, I don’t know how to … I don’t have any words, but please forgive me, please understand why—’

  The teacher’s jaw moved as he spoke, as did the flesh and skin of his face, all dead, of course, but imitating life with a terrible talent that the surgeon knew he would never understand as long as he lived. No amount of pondering would help, nor rummaging through ribs or guts. Perhaps that was why one died: so that one could finally fathom death.

  ‘Close the door,’ the surgeon said.

  The pharmacist and her husband remained in the corridor as the teacher pushed the door shut after him. The man sank to his knees, and the jar attached to the tube in his chest clattered to a halt beside him. He seemed to be searching the surgeon’s eyes for compassion, but the surgeon wasn’t sure he had any left.

  ‘The official you told me about while I was operating on you – not the one who sent you here, the other one, the one who was punished because he gave all those unnatural powers to humans – were you telling the truth about him?’

  ‘Yes, Saheb, all true. I told you exactly what he said to me.’

  ‘Now think very carefully, and answer me only after you’ve taken the time to do so. Is there any possibility that you lied to me about this other official? Is there any possibility that the official who sent you here and the official who was toying with humans, they were one and the same, and you just cooked up a new character to conceal that part of his past?’

  ‘I swear, I promise you, they were different. Completely different.’

  It was a pity, thought the surgeon, that he would never be able to trust the teacher again, no matter how much sincerity the man put into his words.

  ‘And the official who sent you here, is it possible that he’s toying with you, and with me? That we’re all puppets, and he’s just entertaining himself ?’

  The man didn’t blurt out an answer this time. This question was clearly not entirely foreign to his thoughts.

  ‘When the official offered to help us, I have to admit that my first fear was that this was some kind of trap. But why would he play with us like this? What could he gain from it?’

  ‘Does a puppeteer need a purpose?’

  ‘With lives, Saheb? How cruel would he have to be?’

  ‘Have you ever seen a cockfight? There was one in this village a few months ago. They attached knives to the roosters’ feet.’

  ‘The official wouldn’t do that to us, I’m telling you. He isn’t that kind of person.’

  ‘He isn’t a person.’

  The surgeon reached for the cup from which the earthly official had drunk. It was empty except for a sediment of tea powder at its bottom. One could read the future in it, or so he’d heard. He rolled the cup in his fingers, wondering whose future it was supposed to be – his or the official’s.

  ‘I don’t know what’s worse,’ he said. ‘A bureaucracy that force
s you to bribe, or one in which bribery isn’t even an option.’

  ‘Saheb, there’s at least one official in the afterlife who’s willing to break unjust rules. Someone who is kind. Maybe there are more.’

  ‘Yes, and look at what his kindness has brought you.’

  ‘It’s helped us meet you, Saheb. Even if we die again this very moment, we would still be blessed by the hours we’ve spent in the presence of a great man.’

  The obsequious way the teacher kept twisting his fingers into coils aggravated the surgeon. He walked the teacup to the side table. If he were to smash it, it would just create shards for the pharmacist to sweep up. It was a sign of cowardice anyway, the venting of anger on inanimate things. The surgeon let the cup clatter onto the tray.

  ‘When you speak this kind of nonsense,’ he spat, ‘it just makes me wonder if you have more lies to reveal, if you’re fattening me with flattery before you betray me again.’

  The teacher recoiled at these words. His pathetic expression infuriated the surgeon further.

  ‘Maybe I should just announce this in the village square? “Gather around, O villagers, and listen to me. The dead are here to live, or rather, remain dead, among us. Let’s welcome them into our community.”’

  ‘I really, Saheb … I don’t know if it’s a good idea to even think about something like that. The official might be forced to kill everyone—’

  ‘How the fuck does it matter? We’re slaves in both worlds either way. And your official wouldn’t dare kill a whole village, would he? Maybe that’s what I should do: announce this to the villagers right away, and then the officials, for once, won’t have a choice—’

  ‘Please, Saheb, please don’t say that. The official is listening to everything, I’m sure—’

  The surgeon was in a state beyond sleep now. It was a dense, saturating daze from which there could be no sleeping or awakening. He collapsed back into his chair.

  ‘What the hell am I supposed to do with you people then?’